


The Digging Finger

by stargategeek



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-08
Updated: 2017-08-08
Packaged: 2018-12-12 18:27:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11742678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stargategeek/pseuds/stargategeek
Summary: "It feels easier - wanting what you can never have. After a while the pain begins to feel more familiar, more meaningful than the love itself ever was."





	The Digging Finger

"Tell me something," she muttered softly from where she lay. "Please."

He looked over to her from where he was sitting. His eyes looked round and hollow in the dim light. She'd never seen him look so old, so tired. 

"Something..." he said it like an open-ended question. His hand making a nonchalant flick in the air beside his head.

"You never talk about her," she looked at him with hard blue eyes. 

She sees his face shift ever so slightly. The pulsing tick in his temple just above the corner of his cheekbone, and the way his lips pressed and pursed, and rolled into the left side of his mouth. He swallowed heavily, but his eyes never left hers even as they hardened into grey, shimmerless stone. He brought the goblet in his hand up to his mouth and drank slowly, continuing to stare at her over the faded bronze-gold rim.

She sat up, letting her loose red hair spill over the slightly exposed peak of her pale shoulder, holding his gaze, enticing him, daring him to break first.

"Tell me something about your childhood together."

He paused in his long slow draught, his mouth not leaving the security of the cup, though his eyes flashed towards hers in warning.  
She did not back down from his intent gaze; he did not frighten her. She knew this was a sore point of his, that he kept those few precious childhood memories as closely guarded as a priceless set of jewels. Sometimes, she wanted to dig her nails in to his skin so hard that it would bruise, press that sore point until it bled. It pleased her, to see his face screw up in pain - something, anything other than the cold mask he wore.

"What would it matter?" he placed the goblet on the little table next to his chair. His voice was soft, though she could see the way his left hand pointer finger dug into the carved groove of the armrest. "The girl in those stories was hardly the mother you knew." His ringed middle finger tapped on the wood quietly as he uncrossed then recrossed his long legs. "Besides, they are hardly comforting tales."

"Tell me one anyway," she sat up fully, draping one of her long legs over the edge of the mattress, letting it dangle just tantalizingly out of reach. "I hardly find comfort in the pretty stories anyways. Fairytales cease to bring any sort of ease to my mind. Tell me about her."

"Cat..." another open-ended question. 

Sansa nodded. "Your Cat, the one that you remember."

"My Cat..." he mutters thoughtfully, his head coming to lazily rest on his right fist. "My Cat never existed."

"That's not the point, Petyr," she chides, scooping her hair over to one shoulder to braid it loosely.

"What is the point then?" His voice mocks but she can still hear the hollow tap tap tap of his ring on the armrest.

"Paint me a picture," Sansa teases. "You like pictures, don't you? Paint me a picture of the girl you loved."

The tapping stops, rather ominously. His left hand now firmly clenched over the aged wood, digging his nails into the underside, no doubt.

She can see, without staring too obviously, the way his bottom teeth grind along the the upper ridge of his mouth, his mouth rolling and puckering as though he were sucking the words from between his molars. They tasted bitter, didn't they? Bitter and sweet and harsh against his tongue.

"Sansa..." he said gruffly. Almost chiding in its own simple way, tsking her for breaking their unspoken agreement. She could've laughed, she almost did; she had a finger in the wound and soon she would start digging.

"What was she like?" she asked, finishing the plait in her hair and tossing it over her shoulder again. "Did she kiss you? Did she like kissing you?"

"Don't be cruel," he said softly, smiling as though in jest , but the lines around his eyes crinkled in unmistakable pain.

"Am I?" Sansa chirped. "Am I being cruel? Is it cruel to ask you for something so simple. I mean, she was my mother, I have a right to know."

His fist clenched and released over the armrest, his knuckles turning white for barely a second before fading away into a dull reddy-pink once more.

"I want to know, Petyr," Sansa continued. "I want to know about my mother, the sides of her I never got to see. You have something of my hers nobody else has, and I want it. Why won't you share her with me? Haven't I earned that much?"

His face remained neutral, though she could feel the way his insides twisted from the subtle way his brow furrowed. "Don't ask me..." he hissed, a husky threatening whisper. "Don't ask me to give it up."

"Why not?"

"No one has ever asked me to divulge that secret, and I intend to keep it."

"Why?" she could feel herself getting angry, an anger she had never felt so hot and nagging, burning at the back of her skull and under her eyes.

"Because it is mine."

His voice had risen, not quite a yell, but a firm, icy timbre, that commanded the digging finger to stop. 

She felt it wash over her like a bucket of ice water, the coldness by which he pushed her away with his eyes and his words. Holding her off from the prize, the golden apple he kept hidden under his breast. In a breath, in a flurry, the white hot anger returned, and in three steps she had reached him, bringing her hand up to connect hotly with his left cheek. The slap had stunned him; he blinked back at her with wide, perturbed eyes, his hands still clutched around the armrests. 

"You are the cruelest man I have ever met," she hisses the words as though the taste of them in her own mouth was foul and bitter. 

His cheek blossomed a dull milky white with the imprint of her palm. His eyes fixed on hers as empty and sad as ever, but now with an edge of something just a touch darker. 

"I suppose I am," he gritted out the words with such a heavy finality that Sansa could not form another word, or even the motivation to keep up the digging finger, now pressed upon a new wound that she herself created. The air thudded around them like a dead weight dropping to the floor. 

"I hate you," she whispered.

"I know." 

Petyr looked so weary now, more so than before. Drained. She stepped away from him, feeling exhausted herself. Fighting with him was useless; hurting him like this felt just as useless. As much as it felt good to worm her way under his skin he always managed to make her feel ill for the effort. He was not ripe, he was rotten. Sanguine and sallow.

"You must've loved her very much," Sansa turns her face from him quickly, feeling the way her own mask began to crumble.

"I did," his voice sounded pained, even with its softness. "It still means very little."

"Not to you," Sansa slowly climbed on her bed, her bones feeling heavy and weighed down by her own sadness. 

"I've always been a fool," his voice was suddenly closer. She could sense his presence behind her, standing at the side of her bed, looming over where she lay on her stomach. "It feels easier - wanting what you can never have. After a while the pain begins to feel more familiar, more meaningful than the love itself ever was."

One hand presses into the mattress near the side of her head while the other comes to gently caress her face, coaxing her weary eyes open. He hovered above her, careful not to touch her body with his even as he held himself just inches from her. The look in his eyes was warmer than she's seen it in a while, and she could just see the way his supporting arm shook under his weight.

"She only ever made one promise to me," his voice was husky and warm. Sansa turned her body to lie on her back facing him, her legs falling open slightly as they fell off the edge of the bed. The hand caressing her face dropped to the curling ends of her fiery red hair. "Just one promise our entire lives," his eyes dipped to his fingers, glazed over in sad fondness. "She never kept it."

Sansa raised her hands to cup his face, and instinctually he sank into the touch - as though he'd been holding himself still before then. His eyes closed and his mask melted, like frost, dripping from his face into her palms for just a moment.

Petyr turned his face and pressed a kiss into the palm of her left hand while the other slipped into his dark hair, scratching along his skull to the bright white streak at his temple. A soft groan muttered into her skin. 

His eyes fluttered open - half-lidded, grey and sad. 

"You won't keep it either."

Sansa stopped her movements to stare at him, once again feeling the coldness between them, even in such close proximity.

He pulled away and she let him, remaining stock still on the bed.

Silently he stalked back to his chair before the fire and draped himself back on to it. Resuming his dark, quiet rumination in its hellish glow and burying himself behind the stained rim of his wine goblet.

Sansa stared up at the ceiling and resisted the hollow emptiness that slowly sank into the pit of her chest. The oppressive weight of the space between them. 

He was right, she realizes, it wasn't a very comforting tale after all.

**Author's Note:**

> Ahh! Feels good to write again!
> 
> Don't know quite what this is yet. May be a one shot, may be a few chapters. Mostly this is a depository of scenes I have written for Creature Under Winterfell that didn't quite fit with the storyline, so I have decided to place them here, because they are moody and they feed me.
> 
> The short of it: I am a dramatic angst whore, and this is how I get off. Blame it on Aidan Gillen's emotional texture...it's delicious.
> 
> Enjoy.
> 
> As always. Writing experiments. Fresh from the angst lab!


End file.
